Indelible

An old friend of mine, Todd Ronning of Two Harbors, has carved out a fine artisan's niche for himself. He was a forester for awhile, then worked for years at one of the big employers in town. But he had been tinkering in his basement with the idea that he could carve beautiful depictions of lakes in wood, and suspected that people in this shore-obsessed state would want such works for their walls. If you take the common figure of ten thousand lakes and multiply by a very conservative five cabins per lake, you begin to see the potential for such an endeavor; add in the den at home and the figure doubles. He's been busily self-employed ever since, and he still produces every one of his Lake Carvings free-handed with a high speed router. But only I know why he's so freakin' obsessed with maps.

When we were twelve or thirteen, Todd and I decided to venture out on our first overnight canoe trip. Although we were boys of northern Minnesota, we wisely did not choose the Boundary Waters for this little experiment. We chose a stretch of the Cloquet River, an iron-red tributary to the St. Louis, not far from my family's cabin. The Cloquet is a tame course, meandering through piney upland and spruce bog, interrupted by the occasional Class II rapid where the river cuts through eskers and drumlins, ancient glacial remnants. We launched at the landing near Bear Lake, and headed off into mysterious bends in the river we had never seen before. No roads reach the Cloquet on this twelve-mile run.

We stopped at Marion Lake, roughly the halfway point, and started to pitch camp. But the sun was still high in the sky, and I suspect the awareness dawned on us that we would be out in the sticks without a ready escape once Bigfoot came a-callin'. So we decided to pack up and paddle the rest of the way to the relative security of Doc Barney's portage, where the adults would drive to meet us the next day. We had already descended a riffle below Marion Lake when we realized that we'd left a hatchet behind. Instead of portaging back around the fast water, we struggled to paddle up, and actually made it. Now audacious upstream paddlers--certainly a badge of honor for any capable timber cruiser--we claimed the axe and headed back downstream.

Did I mention that the Cloquet is a fairly tame course? Well, I think we underestimated just how tame it could be. We soon entered a stretch of earthly purgatory that has forever remained known in our common lore as "the squigglies." The squigglies were to river running what flossing is to eating, what shoveling is to winter, what pledge drives are to oratory. The river did not run; it sat, fat and heavy, and oozed mosquitos. We became convinced that we were going in circles--and I don't mean "convinced" in the way a dissembling 40-year-old uses the word. We were spooked by the river's seeming immutability, Paul Bunyan's Round River writ real. We believed we were absolutely, impossibly lost.

Through sheer clueless perseverance, we did eventually reach the portage that afternoon, relieved by the eventual static roar of the rapids reaching up the river. Unfortunately, the eerieness did not end there. We fished for awhile, and I think Todd caught a walleye below the rapids. But we hit the sack early, not equipped with anything like a cribbage board, a good book, or tales of foolish boys and their squiggly imaginations to keep us occupied. I remember waking up and checking my simple watch--it was already eight!! A new day had broken misty and damp, but we had made it through the backcountry night to the morning of our rescue. And then the mist got heavier, the damp murkier, and we realized that we had been asleep for all of about an hour. Night continued to fall on our heavy spirits.

I have enjoyed dozens of successful backcountry tours since that wilderness baptism in dread. The lesson I learned: as bad as things can sometimes seem when you are out there, it always makes for a good story afterwards. Todd obviously learned an additional lesson: etch your path indelibly, and you'll always be able to find your way home.